confused with debt free direct

[pedroblue]

My wife and i are almost 2 years into our iva set up with debt free direct.
We would just like to highlight a few frustrations that we have encountered with them along the way.
When the iva was accepted you are advised to notify them of any changes in your income/expenditure.From last May,our review month,to the end of the year we had an increase of £85 in our monthly mortgage and gas direct debit.Every time there was an increase we wrote to them with proof of the extra expenditure,but paid the money as required.It was just like the pre iva days,robbing Peter to pay Paul.
In all that time we never had any response from them not even aknowledging the letters we had sent.Then during December we had a call from their variations team asking us if we wanted them to do an assesment of our income /exp to see if we could still afford our iva payements.We agreed and sent everything off to them in early January,along with proof of my rather nice 13% pay rise that came in to effect on 1st January.
We knew my pay rise would have an effect on our monthly repayments,but when we had the results of the variations review we found that they were using our original almost 2 year old figures to conduct there findings,and not the ones provided at our annual review last May,but what was probably most frustrating was the fact they still had us down as paying £551/month and not the £631 we have been paying since May.
My wife rang them to discuss their findings and ask a number of questions that we felt needed to be answered.It appears all the extra money we had been paying to cover the mortgage and gas costs are simply gone and forgotten,because we did pay it ment we could afford to pay it,no matter which pot we took the money from.
The upshot of there variations review is that now we have to pay £681/month,because of my pay rise.
We feel we are trying to do things by the book,but DFD have to be one of the poorest companys for communicating with their clients that frankly we wouldn't recommend them to anyone trying to escape from their finacial nightmares.

[MelanieGiles]

I am afraid that there does seem to be a correlation between the number of complaints recieved on this site and the size of the IP firm.

[luluj]

Sorry DFD have been great with us. Every letter I have sent, every call I have made has been recorded by them on their records. I have started to email them now to save on postage and only last week within an hour of my email it was acknowledged, and twelve hours later question resolved by them! They did apologise for loosing the additional £3500 and £699 payments I made - on top of my monthly amount - they simply had not added them to my account, but because I could give them dates of payment etc they were able to quickly locate them on the bank statements their end and have since sent me an ad-hoc letter confirming all payments!
I keep a copy of all emails, letters and record of all calls made - that way they find it very difficult to say "you haven't informed us!".

[MelanieGiles]

Glad to see that they managed to find such a substantial sum of money after you drew their attention to it Lulu, and that you are happy with your IP firm. For every complaint, there are probably 10 content customers.

[Lisa2009]

mr skint was with DFD. They were ok, they left us alone after the proposal was accepted. Only time we heard from them was when the annual review was due.
IP was impossible to speak to and although i have moaned about him we were able to speak to another lady there who assisted us with a F&F.
I would have to say the good points outweighed the bad.
There is always going to be good and bad with most firms, a lot of which has been posted on this forum over time but im sure there would be far more good than bad in any.

[luluj]

Mrs Skint - DFD review time -what paperwork do they ask for Pay slips,P45? Do they want bank statements too??

Just interested!

[Lisa2009]

Bank statements, wage slips and proof of any utilities or insurances or such like that may have increased. The funniest we were asked for was proof of school dinners for 4 kids. We were like "errr vending machines dont give reciepts and neither does the chippy" coz thats what the oldest 2 did.